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Michele Cobb reports on Digital Book World

For two days in January, Digital Book World brought together some of the best and brightest in publishing to discuss the future with an eye to improving sales and revenue results. The key phrases that got repeated were content, content, content and business model. What publishers make is important. However, no one can JUST make good content – future success revolves around ensuring that consumers know about the content and that purchase of the content is easy and appealing. For audio publishers the challenges of marketing in a digital world, creating good metadata, marketing in the online space and delivering error free digital files are nothing new.

Audio publishers have operated in the digital space for more than a decade – adapted, used technology to change how and what is done and been able to grow the market from those changes. At the panel devoted to the Audiobook Boom these competencies were on full display. HarperAudio discussed their commitment to quality – ensuring a good recording (both technically and from a performance perspective) to entice listeners back with a good experience. 3M explained that libraries continue to be a good source for audio title discovery, the APA shared facts and figures about the growing number of titles being produced and Scribd described excitement around the recent launch of audiobooks into their subscription model. The audience sat up and took notice at the revelations.